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The transforming power of modern American conservatism over the last 50 years has been unmistakable. In the late 1940s, we seemed to be headed for a socialist world in which Marxism/Leninism could only be contained, not defeated. In the 1990s, we celebrated the collapse of Soviet communism and the adoption of liberal democracy and free markets around the world because of the leadership of charismatic conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The impacts of modern conservatism in America have been equally profound. There is renewed public skepticism about Big Government, a "leave us alone" attitude that stretches back as far as the Founding of the Republic. Because of Conservative initiatives like welfare reform, several of the nation's leading cultural indicators, such as violent crime, teenage births, and the child poverty rate, have declined. And in the wake of 9/11, a prudential internationalism has evolved, based on this principle: Act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary.
The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1947 that "there seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals." Fiveandahalf decades later, the Conservative columnist George Will wrote that we had experienced "the intellectual collapse of socialism" in America and around the world.
The one political constant throughout those 50 years has been the rise of the Right, whose Long March to national power and prominence was often interrupted by the death of its leaders, calamitous defeats at the polls, frequent feuding within its ranks over means and ends, and the perennial hostility of the prevailing liberal establishment. But through the power of its ideas ever linked by the priceless principle of ordered liberty and the unceasing dissemination and application of those ideas, the Conservative movement has become a major, and often the dominant, player in the political and economic realms of America.
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